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Upgrading RAID 1 array w/ larger hard drives gone wrong

Y

YankeeDoodle

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 29, 2010
Messages
67
Ok, so there are plenty of resources out on the internet which detail the process of migrating your array to a larger set of hard drives. I know there are a few different ways to do this, but I chose to follow the process outlined by Intel RST because that's the RAID I'm using off my mobo's chipset (P67 ICH10R) and because it seemed a little more straightforward than the last time I did this. The link to the article is here: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-030751.htm.

Now what threw a wench into this process is the fact that I was upgrading from 2TB hard drives to 4TB. So after I rebuilt the array onto the single 4TB disk, as indicated in the steps, I booted back into Windows 7 to extend the volume to take advantage of the larger drive. As soon as I tried this, it wouldn't let me add more than 2TB. I quickly realized I had to convert the disk from MBR to GPT in order to handle more than the 2TB limit of MBR. I downloaded a program to convert to GPT without losing the data I migrated onto the drive earlier (AOMEI Partition Assistant). Converted to GPT just fine and so I proceeded to the last step of the process: #18 Follow the prompts to create a new RAID 1 volume. Your data will then be migrated from the single large hard drive to the new RAID 1 volume.

After I created the RAID volume in RST, it prompted me stating I had to initialize the 2nd disk using Windows Disk Management. Open up disk mgmt and it immediately prompts me to initialize using either MBR or GPT. After I picked GPT, the volume color turned to black and said "Unallocated". It looked like I lost my data I already migrated earlier....son of a bitch.

I wasn't sure what else I could do so I proceeded to create a new volume and format the drive. I'm currently in the process of Robocopying my data onto the new RAID 1 array, which was how I did it the time before. So I'm left wondering what I did wrong during this process. I can only think of two things:

*because I was migrating from 2TB to 4TB and from MBR to GPT, I was doomed from the start and I should have just copied my data over manually like before
*I needed to go into disk mgmt and initialize the 2nd drive BEFORE I created the RAID volume. I thought if there were any exceptions, the Intel doc would have at least given a warning of some kind rather than just assuming the user knows to go and do that mini-step beforehand

Comments? Advice for next time? Thank you!
 
1. disconnect both drives from computer from old raid 1
2. connect 2 new drives create new raid array
3. connect 1 drive from old raid 1 and copy over contents to new
4. done

................
 
MrGuvernment said:
1. disconnect both drives from computer from old raid 1
2. connect 2 new drives create new raid array
3. connect 1 drive from old raid 1 and copy over contents to new
4. done

................
Click to expand...

this is exactly what i would do.
 
^^ Yeah, I guess that sounds a lot easier when you put it that way. My data finished copying this morning and would have been done the day before if I had done just as you suggested. Lesson learned I suppose....thanks!
 
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